Esme’s SFPBO 2017: Reign of Blood by Alexia Purdy

This was part of Pornokitch’s grouping, and has since been eliminated.

Plot:

April is a 17-year-old girl who’s living through an apocalyptic Earth. A virus was released and more than 70% of humanity was infected and turned into vampire like creatures. April and her family managed to get out of the Las Angeles area and move up into the mountains in a fortified bunker.

They go into the city from time to time for supplies, but only during the day, and they have to make it back by nighttime.

Early in the book April becomes separated from her family, her brother and mother are missing and there’s blood all over the van they used to get around, she can’t find them but is forced to head back to the compound because it’s getting dark and she can’t be out after sundown.

Eventually, she runs into a ‘girl’ who’s obviously a vampire, except she speaks to April before April kills her. It struck April as very odd because none of the other vampires have ever spoken to her fore. She sort of shrugs it off as an anomaly until she meets more of these vampire hybrids who aren’t totally feral but are clearly not human anymore.

She has to make a choice to either trust this new group of vampires she’s found who are more like people than not – and if she does she has to find a way to enlist their help to find her family.

Final Score: 6/10

Characters:

April is the MC and this is a book told in the second person all from her POV, so you get to know her rather well.

She longs for her old life where homework was her biggest challenge in life, she misses her father who died before the virus ran rampant through humanity. Most of all she wants to find her family, it’s the end goal for her and she’ll die before she gives up on them.

She’s actually fairly cold, she’s grown numb to killing and doesn’t think twice about rampaging through vampire hideouts and killing every one of them. Even after she’s told that the girl she killed was a hybrid, and wasn’t a threat to April, she shows little to no remorse.

She’s immune to vampires mind tricks and isn’t affected by direct eye contact with them like most humans are – it comes into play later on in the book.

Final Score: 5/10

World Building:

This is set in ‘modern times’ just after humanity was wiped out by this virus.

There are full ‘feral’ vampires that are very light sensitive, (they burst into flames), they’re mostly mindless killing machines. They can sniff out blood from a while off, have red eyes and fangs.

There are ‘hybrid’ vampires who haven’t fully turned, they are sensitive to light, but it’s more like sun burn. They need to drink blood, but it doesn’t have to be human and it doesn’t have to be often.

There are almost no humans left, and after April’s family goes missing, it’s believed she’s the last regular human left in Las Vegas, possibly the world. She has some sort of special immunity where even if she’s bitten she doesn’t turn.

Final Score: 6/10

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Pacing/Prose/Tone:

This is a darker book than the last one I read by Alexia Purdy, this one had a lot more death, a lot more fight scenes and was overall a bleaker book than the last. But, it’s not *super* dark, the latter half of the book is part romance and lightens the tone considerably.

The pacing was pretty good, it’s a shorter book and had a lot of stuff going on so it read quickly.

The writing was better in this one than the last one I read by Purdy, but it still had some repetitive phrases or information.

Pacing Final Score: 8/10

Writing Final Score: 7/10

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Originality:

It’s tough for me to judge this kind of thing with a genre I never really explore – like vampire fantasy. I’m not sure why but vampires aren’t really my thing and I usually avoid books about them. This did sort of go off what most vampire stories do, however, needing blood, light sensitive, red eyes, bloodthirsty. The hybrids were something new, I haven’t seen many things like a ‘half turned’ vampire.